Zhuque-3 and New Glenn both fly methane-fueled reusable boosters that achieved their first successful recovery landings within nine months of each other, but they operate at very different scales. New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket capable of placing roughly 45,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit, while Zhuque-3 is a medium-lift vehicle designed for payloads of about 11,800 kilograms.
Built by LandSpace in China, Zhuque-3 achieved China’s first leg landing of an orbital-class booster in August 2026 after an initial test flight in December 2025. Built by Blue Origin in the United States, New Glenn completed its first booster landing in November 2025 and accomplished its first booster reflight in April 2026. While both programs share a focus on first-stage reusability and clean-burning propellants, they target entirely distinct customer bases and reflect different manufacturing philosophies.
The Comparison at a Glance
| Measure | Zhuque-3 | New Glenn |
|---|---|---|
| Builder | LandSpace (private, China) | Blue Origin (private, United States) |
| Vehicle status | Active flight test and operational ramp | Active flight operations and commercial service |
| Height | About 65.9 meters | About 98 meters |
| Core diameter | Not published | 7 meters |
| Structural material | Stainless steel | Not published |
| First-stage engines | 9 TQ-12A (methane / liquid oxygen) | 7 BE-4 (methane / liquid oxygen) |
| Second-stage engines | Methalox configuration | 2 BE-3U (liquid hydrogen / liquid oxygen) |
| Payload to LEO (expendable) | About 11,800 kg | About 45,000 kg |
| Payload to LEO (reusable) | Roughly 8,000 kg | No separate figure published |
| Payload to GTO | Not published | About 13,600 kg |
| First-stage recovery method | Onshore landing legs | Ocean platform vessel (Jacklyn) |
| First orbital flight | 3 December 2025 | 16 January 2025 (NG-1) |
| First successful booster landing | 18 August 2026 | 13 November 2025 (NG-2) |
| Booster reflight record | Zero reflights | One reflight (NG-3, 19 April 2026) |
| Primary launch site | Domestic Chinese spaceport | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, LC-36 |
Scale and Capacity: Heavy Lift Against Medium Lift
The most fundamental distinction between Zhuque-3 and New Glenn is their payload class. Blue Origin designed New Glenn as a heavy-lift launch vehicle sized to deploy large constellations, national security payloads, and deep-space missions. In its flown 7-engine booster and 2-engine upper-stage arrangement, New Glenn stands approximately 98 meters tall with a wide 7-meter fairing envelope. According to Wikipedia’s New Glenn documentation, New Glenn delivers roughly 45,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) and about 13,600 kilograms to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). Blue Origin has also described a larger 9-engine variant targeting over 70,000 kilograms to LEO, but that variant remains an unproven future goal that has not flown.
Zhuque-3 sits in the medium-lift class, standing about 65.9 meters tall. When flown in an expendable profile where the booster expends all of its propellant to maximize performance, Zhuque-3 can place about 11,800 kilograms into low Earth orbit. When LandSpace reserves propellant for the booster’s boostback burn, reentry burn, and final landing burn, that payload figure drops to roughly 8,000 kilograms. As detailed on OrbitalIntel’s Zhuque-3 explainer, this capacity matches the requirements of domestic satellite broadband constellations, but it provides less than a fifth of New Glenn’s lifting capacity to low Earth orbit.
This volume and mass disparity dictates the types of missions each vehicle can accept. A single New Glenn launch can deploy dozens of heavy broadband satellites or massive geostationary communications platforms that require high-energy upper stages. Zhuque-3 is optimized for modular constellation distribution, lofting smaller batches of satellites directly into targeted orbital planes.
Engines, Propellant, and Core Architecture
Both launch vehicles represent the broader industry transition toward methane and liquid oxygen, commonly referred to as methalox. Methane burns cleanly and leaves minimal soot buildup in turbomachinery, cutting the refurbishment time needed between flights compared to traditional rocket-grade kerosene. However, the two engineering teams implemented this propellant choice differently across their booster and upper-stage architectures.
Zhuque-3 relies on nine TQ-12A methalox engines clustered on its booster base. LandSpace developed these engines through iterative testing on its smaller Zhuque-2 vehicle, which reached orbit in 2023. Zhuque-3 carries this methalox architecture through both stages, maintaining a single propellant supply chain and uniform ground infrastructure. LandSpace also selected stainless steel for Zhuque-3’s primary tankage and outer hull, mirroring the material strategy seen in the Zhuque-3 vs. Starship comparison. Stainless steel provides high thermal tolerance during atmospheric reentry, resists corrosion, and costs far less per ton to fabricate than specialized aerospace alloys.
New Glenn employs seven BE-4 engines on its first stage, generating immense liftoff thrust with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Blue Origin began development of New Glenn before 2013 and officially announced the vehicle in 2016, naming it in honor of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronaut John Glenn. Unlike Zhuque-3, New Glenn shifts propellants on its second stage. The upper stage utilizes two vacuum-optimized BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Liquid hydrogen offers exceptional specific impulse, which gives New Glenn the high-energy efficiency required to push heavy payloads into high-altitude geostationary transfer orbits or escape trajectories. The tradeoff is operational complexity, as liquid hydrogen requires specialized vacuum-jacketed ground lines, ultra-cold cryogenic storage, and large tank volumes due to hydrogen’s low density.
Landing Records and Booster Recovery Operations
The operational recovery of orbital-class boosters is an exceptionally challenging engineering discipline. While SpaceX demonstrated that booster recovery was achievable with Falcon 9, both Blue Origin and LandSpace have entered the operational landing phase through independent paths. The technical mechanics behind these maneuvers are outlined in our guide to reusable rockets.
Blue Origin designed New Glenn’s first stage to touch down downrange on an automated ocean-going landing vessel named Landing Platform Vessel 1, nicknamed Jacklyn. Ocean platform landings eliminate the need for a booster to spend substantial propellant flying all the way back to the launch site, preserving maximum performance for heavy commercial payloads. According to Wikipedia’s List of New Glenn launches, New Glenn’s maiden flight, NG-1, launched on 16 January 2025 and reached orbit successfully, but the booster was lost during its landing attempt. On its second flight, NG-2, on 13 November 2025, Blue Origin achieved its first successful booster touchdown on Jacklyn. Blue Origin built the New Glenn first stage for a design life of a minimum of 25 missions.
LandSpace approaches recovery via onshore recovery pads in mainland China. On its maiden orbital flight on 3 December 2025, Zhuque-3 reached orbit successfully but failed to recover its booster. On 18 August 2026, Zhuque-3 completed its second orbital launch, carrying a satellite payload to orbit and executing a controlled return burn. The first stage deployed its landing legs and touched down upright at the landing zone in Gansu province. This event marked China’s first leg landing of an orbital-class booster, verifying LandSpace’s guidance algorithms, throttling controls, and landing gear mechanisms under operational conditions.
Reflight Experience and Operational Setbacks
Demonstrating a single landing proves that a booster can return from space, but true reusability requires inspecting, refuelling, and launching that same hardware on a subsequent orbital mission. In this operational metric, New Glenn currently holds an advantage over Zhuque-3, although both programs have experienced severe setbacks.
Blue Origin conducted its first booster reflight on the NG-3 mission on 19 April 2026. The flight utilized the refurbished first-stage booster recovered from the NG-2 mission five months prior. The booster executed its ascent and returned to touch down successfully on the Jacklyn platform for a second time, proving the multi-flight capability of the BE-4 engines and the main stage structure. However, the mission suffered a partial failure when an anomaly occurred on the second stage, deploying the customer’s satellite payload into an incorrect orbit. Blue Origin faced a further setback on 28 May 2026, when a separate static-fire test vehicle was destroyed in a launch pad explosion during testing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
LandSpace has not yet reflown a booster. It also was unable to preserve its recovered booster from the successful 18 August 2026 landing. While the booster touched down upright on its legs, ground teams encountered a post-landing fire while attempting to offload residual propellants. The fire compromised the stage’s structural integrity, causing the booster to tip over and suffer total loss. As a result, LandSpace could not examine the flight-stressed hardware for turnaround refurbishment, resetting its timeline to demonstrate an actual booster reflight. Both programs illustrate that landing the rocket is only one part of the reuse cycle. Safely securing the vehicle on the ground and executing flawless upper-stage delivery matter just as much.
Funding Models, Launch Sites, and Customer Base
The economic foundations supporting Zhuque-3 and New Glenn reflect their respective home markets. Neither company sells launches to the other’s core clientele, insulating both programs from direct competitive bidding.
Blue Origin operates out of Space Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, with plans for a future secondary launch site at Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 14 in California. Development of New Glenn has been backed by private capital, with total program development costs estimated at at least $2.5 billion. Published industry cost estimates for a single New Glenn launch generally range from about $68 million to $110 million, though Blue Origin does not publish a binding fixed retail price sheet. New Glenn targets United States commercial satellite operators, NASA deep-space missions, and national security launch contracts. The rocket’s competitive position within the broader United States commercial launch market is further explored in our Falcon 9 vs. New Glenn comparison.
LandSpace is a venture-backed commercial space enterprise founded in Beijing in 2015. To fund its production facilities and vehicle development, LandSpace filed for a public listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Science and Technology Innovation Board (STAR Market) at the close of 2025. LandSpace does not compete for Western commercial satellites due to strict export control regulations. Instead, Zhuque-3 addresses the domestic launch demand created by China’s national broadband satellite projects, detailed in our report on China’s reusable rocket programs. With hundreds of satellites required to establish these state-authorized constellations, LandSpace is building Zhuque-3 to serve domestic commercial and civil space entities requiring reliable, low-cost domestic launch services.
What Would Change This Comparison
Several technological and operational milestones could alter the relative positioning of these two vehicles in the coming years:
- A successful Zhuque-3 booster reflight. If LandSpace recovers a booster intact without post-landing fires and launches that exact booster on a second mission, LandSpace will become the first Chinese entity to achieve orbital booster reuse. This would confirm that its stainless-steel architecture can withstand multiple flight cycles.
- Flight testing of New Glenn’s larger variant. Blue Origin has outlined a prospective 9-engine variant capable of delivering over 70,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. If Blue Origin builds and flies this configuration, it will move New Glenn into an even heavier performance tier, widening the capability gap over medium-lift rockets like Zhuque-3.
- Upper-stage mission reliability for New Glenn. Following the NG-3 second-stage anomaly that left a satellite in the wrong orbit, Blue Origin must prove that its high-energy hydrogen upper stage can reliably execute precise orbital insertions across routine commercial campaigns.
- Resolution of ground propellant offloading for LandSpace. LandSpace’s loss of its landed booster on 18 August 2026 proved that ground-handling procedures for residual methalox are as critical as flight software. Demonstrating safe propellant safing and rapid pad clearance will determine whether LandSpace can turn around hardware economically.
Who Each Rocket Fits
Because Zhuque-3 and New Glenn operate in segregated regulatory jurisdictions, satellite operators rarely have the option to pick between them. Evaluating which rocket fits a given mission depends entirely on customer geography, payload mass, and destination orbit.
New Glenn fits large Western commercial satellite operators, United States civil agencies, and national security missions that require substantial mass to orbit. Organizations needing to lift large communications satellites into geostationary transfer orbit or deploy dozens of constellation spacecraft in a single launch require New Glenn’s 45,000-kilogram capacity and high-energy hydrogen second stage. New Glenn also serves institutional customers with strict procurement mandates that exclude non-domestic launch providers.
Zhuque-3 fits Chinese commercial satellite enterprises, research institutes, and domestic constellation operators building out China’s orbital communications networks. For operators launching batches of medium-sized satellites into low Earth orbit from Chinese launch sites, Zhuque-3 offers an domestically built, stainless-steel medium-lift option. Its roughly 8,000-kilogram reusable payload capacity aligns directly with the mass requirements of domestic constellation planes without requiring the purchase of an oversized heavy-lift booster.
Operators evaluating Western heavy-lift options can compare New Glenn’s performance against existing alternatives in our Starship vs. New Glenn analysis, while those studying Chinese launch development can follow LandSpace’s vehicle iterations through our dedicated Zhuque-3 explainer.